Emerging Energy Research’s annual Wind Turbine Market Share Update reveals a 2008 global turbine market in which high demand and supply chain backlogs offered plenty of room for all: established players averaged installation growth of more than 50%, while several newer players saw installations jump by 100% and more.

Although the landmark year helped new competitors such as Sinovel, Dongfang, and Clipper make modest inroads into the leaders’ market share, the turbine market remains dominated by Vestas, GE, Gamesa, Enercon, Suzlon, and Siemens who, as a group, accounted for 70% of last years’ installations. Buoyed by 2007’s bursting order books, turbine manufacturers installed almost 11GW more turbines in 2008 than in the previous year, totaling nearly 30GW of turbines activated during the year, with the USA and China accounting for 48% of that amount. The battle for market share is expected to intensify in 2009-2010 as the economic slowdown continues and as local suppliers in the USA and China ramp production. With more than 15 turbine vendors scrambling to take business from the big six, players with diversified order books are best positioned to grow in 2009 as the slowdown will be felt most acutely in the US, a market that weighs heavily in the order books of the major vendors. At the same time, China remains less impacted by the recession; steady performance can be expected from China’s growing number of local turbine suppliers as well as global players with an existing foothold in that market. Investments and plant capacity expansion point to a collective optimism on the part of many manufactures for the long-term market, despite their expectations for modest growth in 2009

and you wonder WHY China needs clean wind power???? Let me give you tens of thousands of reasons…….
The vast majority of China’s power comes from coal, with approximately 300,000 megawatts of coal-fired energy currently online. And while the global trend is to move away from dirty coal power for environmental reasons, China has a over a million tragic reasons why it needs wind power, and needs it in a hurry. According numbers recently released by People.com.cn, at least 1.3 million coal workers have died in coal mine accidents since 1995. Or course the Chinese media framed this new data in a positive light to show that accidents have dropped 15% in 2008. But 91,172 deaths are still staggering, and in any other country it would be deemed a national emergency of the highest priority.

Wind farm’s first phase still slated
By Kevin Welch
kevin.welch@amarillo.com
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SHARE THIS STORY: Mesa Power said Monday it’s cutting back on plans for a massive wind farm in the Panhandle, but is ready to move forward on the first phase of the project.
Boone Pickens’ company announced in May its order of 667 turbines from General Electric. The anemic economy put Mesa’s plans on hold by October when Pickens said his investment company, BP Capital, had lost too much money.

The order for turbines will remain the same, but the delivery date is uncertain, Mesa spokesman Jay Rosser said.

Mesa’s announcement Monday said it had cancelled 120 wind leases in the eastern Panhandle but renewed 77 leases covering more than 100,000 acres north of Pampa and west of Miami.

The original plan was to put up enough turbines in stages to have a wind farm rated at 4,000 megawatts covering 400,000 acres in Carson, Gray, Hemphill, Roberts and Wheeler counties. Monday’s plan is to only construct what was to be the first phase of the Pampa Wind Project. Its production would be rated at 1,000 megawatts.

A wind project is rated for its maximum production capacity, but the wind doesn’t blow at 100 percent all the time. Actual production in the Panhandle ranges from 40 to 51 percent, said David Carr, assistant director of the Alternative Energy Institute at West Texas A&M University. That would mean the first phase of Mesa’s wind farm would generate enough electricity to power about 153,000 homes.

Based on average costs for wind farm construction, the price tag would be about $2 billion, not including any transmission.

“We are hopeful that when the economy improves we can further capitalize on this to deliver even more than 1,000 megawatts in the future,” Mesa president and CEO Ray Harris said in a written statement.

According to the state Public Utility Commission, the project will be in operation sometime in 2011.

Rosser could not confirm that schedule Monday.

Mesa said previously it will rely on the federal production tax credit for wind farms. Congress just renewed the program, which provides as much as one third of the income earned by wind farms, for three years.

The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.

And “clean coal,” which involves capturing carbon emissions and sequestering them in the earth, is not clean at all, he asserts.

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. The paper with his findings will be published in the next issue of Energy and Environmental Science but is available online now. Jacobson is also director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford.

“The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful,” Jacobson said. “Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.” He added that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.

To place the various alternatives on an equal footing, Jacobson first made his comparisons among the energy sources by calculating the impacts as if each alternative alone were used to power all the vehicles in the United States, assuming only “new-technology” vehicles were being used. Such vehicles include battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and “flex-fuel” vehicles that could run on a high blend of ethanol called E85.

Wind was by far the most promising, Jacobson said, owing to a better-than 99 percent reduction in carbon and air pollution emissions; the consumption of less than 3 square kilometers of land for the turbine footprints to run the entire U.S. vehicle fleet (given the fleet is composed of battery-electric vehicles); the saving of about 15,000 lives per year from premature air-pollution-related deaths from vehicle exhaust in the United States; and virtually no water consumption. By contrast, corn and cellulosic ethanol will continue to cause more than 15,000 air pollution-related deaths in the country per year, Jacobson asserted.

Because the wind turbines would require a modest amount of spacing between them to allow room for the blades to spin, wind farms would occupy about 0.5 percent of all U.S. land, but this amount is more than 30 times less than that required for growing corn or grasses for ethanol. Land between turbines on wind farms would be simultaneously available as farmland or pasture or could be left as open space.

Indeed, a battery-powered U.S. vehicle fleet could be charged by 73,000 to 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines, fewer than the 300,000 airplanes the U.S. produced during World War II and far easier to build. Additional turbines could provide electricity for other energy needs.

“There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession,” Jacobson said. “Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power.”

Jacobson said that while some people are under the impression that wind and wave power are too variable to provide steady amounts of electricity, his research group has already shown in previous research that by properly coordinating the energy output from wind farms in different locations, the potential problem with variability can be overcome and a steady supply of baseline power delivered to users.

Jacobson’s research is particularly timely in light of the growing push to develop biofuels, which he calculated to be the worst of the available alternatives. In their effort to obtain a federal bailout, the Big Three Detroit automakers are increasingly touting their efforts and programs in the biofuels realm, and federal research dollars have been supporting a growing number of biofuel-research efforts.

“That is exactly the wrong place to be spending our money. Biofuels are the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels,” Jacobson said. “We should be spending to promote energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon emissions and air-pollution mortality, not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all”.

“Obviously, wind alone isn’t the solution,” Jacobson said. “It’s got to be a package deal, with energy also being produced by other sources such as solar, tidal, wave and geothermal power.”

During the recent presidential campaign, nuclear power and clean coal were often touted as energy solutions that should be pursued, but nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration were Jacobson’s lowest-ranked choices after biofuels. “Coal with carbon sequestration emits 60- to 110-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy, and nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy,” Jacobson said. Although carbon-capture equipment reduces 85-90 percent of the carbon exhaust from a coal-fired power plant, it has no impact on the carbon resulting from the mining or transport of the coal or on the exhaust of other air pollutants. In fact, because carbon capture requires a roughly 25-percent increase in energy from the coal plant, about 25 percent more coal is needed, increasing mountaintop removal and increasing non-carbon air pollution from power plants, he said.

Nuclear power poses other risks. Jacobson said it is likely that if the United States were to move more heavily into nuclear power, then other nations would demand to be able to use that option.

“Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it’s straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do,” Jacobson said. “The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide.” Jacobson calculated that if one small nuclear bomb exploded, the carbon emissions from the burning of a large city would be modest, but the death rate for one such event would be twice as large as the current vehicle air pollution death rate summed over 30 years.

Finally, both coal and nuclear energy plants take much longer to plan, permit and construct than do most of the other new energy sources that Jacobson’s study recommends. The result would be even more emissions from existing nuclear and coal power sources as people continue to use comparatively “dirty” electricity while waiting for the new energy sources to come online, Jacobson said.

Jacobson received no funding from any interest group, company or government agency.

Energy and vehicle options, from best to worst, according to Jacobson’s calculations:
Best to worst electric power sources:

1. Wind power 2. concentrated solar power (CSP) 3. geothermal power 4. tidal power 5. solar photovoltaics (PV) 6. wave power 7. hydroelectric power 8. a tie between nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).

Best to worst vehicle options:

1. Wind-BEVs (battery electric vehicles) 2. wind-HFCVs (hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) 3.CSP-BEVs 4. geothermal-BEVs 5. tidal-BEVs 6. solar PV-BEVs 7. Wave-BEVs 8.hydroelectric-BEVs 9. a tie between nuclear-BEVs and coal-CCS-BEVs 11. corn-E85 12.cellulosic-E85.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were examined only when powered by wind energy, but they could be combined with other electric power sources. Although HFCVs require about three times more energy than do BEVs (BEVs are very efficient), HFCVs are still very clean and more efficient than pure gasoline, and wind-HFCVs still resulted in the second-highest overall ranking. HFCVs have an advantage in that they can be refueled faster than can BEVs (although BEV charging is getting faster). Thus, HFCVs may be useful for long trips (more than 250 miles) while BEVs more useful for trips less than 250 miles. An ideal combination may be a BEV-HFCV hybrid.

Related Information
Professor Mark Jacobson discusses alternative energy sources
Jacobson’s paper in Energy & Environmental Science
Jacobson’s Stanford web page
Stanford press release on interconnecting wind farms to smooth power delivery
Jacobson’s interconnecting windfarms paper in J. Applied Meteorology and Climatology

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I am hoping that Google will pick JellyFish Home Wind turbine system as the Google Power idea winner!!! Please VOTE for JellyFish as this idea priced at $500 is the solution just like home solar, each person doing his part to go green and its plug and play simplicity……Great IDEA 4 Home Wind!!

China: 254 CDM Wind Projects in the Pipeline = 13GW     15-Jan-09 12:34 am    

APWR has yet to produce a wind turbine and management has been promising progress in wind power for the past 3 months.   90 days later, there is nothing but empty promises and the stock has dropped 50% in 12 days.   Wake up and smell the coffee APWR management, you either deliver or this market will tank you as you have noticed with a 50% haircut in 12 trading days.   Its about time for another pomp and circumstance PR like the GE Gear Box press release and this time , it will be the CHINESE GOVT going to announce a major wind power contract for APWR.

If you check the net and my blog, I got the GE part right…….., now, will I get the Chinese Government major contract right????   Answer is YES but I have no clue of when or how much.   If China does not start spending that stimulus package , the entire country of China goes down the drain………..its about time for APWR to get a stimulus surplus of press release momentum……..of course we all KNOW the results for 1Q09 will be horrendous and abysmal due to wind misses and cold weather.

So, bottom line, I am going to add some more APWR shares this week based on my ””probability thinking premonition guessing (((that is Scientific SWAG for the non knowledgeable out there)), ie,  its time for China to announce some spending on Wind Power and since 70% must come from companies inside China, its time for APWR to win a very nice size Wind Power contract.

Good luck to all LONGS on APWR and may all shorts burn in hell!!!  I would COVER and take your profits, you earned them and you made them……….dont give away your hard earned profits!

USA 2,454 GE Wind Vestas Siemens

Germany 2,233 Enercon Vestas REPower

India 1,840 Suzlon Enercon Vestas

China 1,334 Goldwind Vestas Gamesa

Spain 1,587 Gamesa Acciona Vestas

France 810 Nordex Vestas REPower

Canada 776 GE Wind Vestas Enercon

UK 631 Vestas Siemens REPower

Portugal 629 Vestas Gamesa Enercon

Italy 417 Gamesa Vestas Enercon

Pelosi, Reid Say No to Coal at U.S. Capitol

Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid today requested that the Capitol Power Plant stop burning coal and instead switch to clean burning natural gas. As the only facility in Washington D.C. still burning coal, the plant is a symbol of our country’s dependence on dirty energy. Their request comes just one day after, the Sierra Club, along with its allies Friends of the Earth and Earthjustice, sent a letter to Congressional leaders on Wednesday, including Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, requesting their support to end coal burning in the District.

In response Bruce Nilles, Director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign issued the following statement.

“Under the strong leadership of Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi, the U.S. Capitol has already made great strides in improving efficiency, increasing recycling and reducing water use. Ending coal use at the Capitol Power Plant is the next significant step, a tangible demonstration of our country’s dedication to a clean energy future.

“Stopping the use of coal at the Capitol Power Plant will help local residents breathe easier, but the positive impacts will stretch far beyond the District. Bold measures are needed right now to reduce global warming emissions and we look forward to continuing to work with Congress and the new Administration to send a clear signal to cities and states across the country that after eight long years, America is serious about clean energy and green jobs.

“Today’s request sets a positive tone as ten thousand young Americans descend on D.C. this weekend to rally for clean energy as part of Power Shift 2009.”

With the 30% credits being offerred by the new US Govt stimulus spending package, small wind 4 homes now makes economic sense…….let me know, comment or email me for options for your home in Colorado!   There are new options out there that are beautiful options without the big ugly turbine looks for commercial units!